Book of the Day
Casino Royale
Ian Fleming · 1953
James Bond exists because a man wanted something to think about other than his own wedding.
Two months in Jamaica
Ian Fleming had a house on the north coast of Jamaica called Goldeneye, where he spent part of each year. On 17 February 1952 he sat down there at a portable typewriter and began a novel.
His engagement to Anne Charteris was, by then, no longer avoidable — they married that March. Fleming's own explanation for starting a book at that precise moment was that he wanted a distraction from his looming nuptials.
The routine was fixed: roughly two thousand words in about three hours, every day, no revising as he went.
He finished on 18 March 1952. Just over a month, start to finish. The book was Casino Royale, and its main character was a secret service agent named James Bond.
The Bond nobody remembers
Long before Sean Connery, there was a Bond on screen — and almost nobody has seen him.
In 1954, the American network CBS broadcast a live one-hour television version of Casino Royale as an episode of its drama series Climax! The agent was played by Barry Nelson, an American, and he was called "Jimmy" Bond. Peter Lorre played the villain, Le Chiffre.
That makes Barry Nelson the first actor ever to play James Bond — eight years before Dr. No.
Awards and screen
Casino Royale has been adapted three separate times, which is unusual for any novel: the 1954 CBS television play, a 1967 spoof, and the 2006 film directed by Martin Campbell that introduced Daniel Craig as Bond and restarted the series.
Did you know
- Fleming said he started the first Bond novel to distract himself from his approaching wedding.
- He wrote it in just over a month — 17 February to 18 March 1952 — at about 2,000 words a day.
- The first man to play James Bond on screen was the American actor Barry Nelson, in 1954.
- In that version Bond was American and was called "Jimmy".
- It is the only Bond novel to have been adapted three separate times.
Is this book on a shelf near you?
BookHome is a neighbourhood book exchange. See who nearby has a copy to lend, swap or sell.